Ask HN: What are pressing issues that will affect humanity this decade? - <AUTHOR> 50 years? 100 years? This year? <comment><USER2> 10 years:

\- Increasing disruption caused by climate change. Extreme weather events, environmental refugees, conflicts over water, famine.

\- Antibiotics becoming increasingly ineffective

\- Living in a massively connected world. Emergent diseases, trans-national political movements, terrorism, weakened states pushed to the point of collapse.

50 years:

\- Severe disruption caused by climate change. Large-scale movement of people and animals from uninhabitable areas, frequent resource conflicts.

\- Food shortages caused by habitat depletion. Famine and death. Breakdown of international trade.

\- Pressure towards authoritarian government systems as a response to the above. Fascism, militarism, large-scale conflict.

100 years: No idea. Singularity? Aliens arrive?

</comment><comment><USER3> 1) Drought, expensive food, lack of freshwater (e.g. California, Nevada, Pakistan) NASA video on groundwater reserves [http://vimeo.com/42607107](http://vimeo.com/42607107)

2) Big Data takeover by government (citizen profiling) and private sector (financial and health discrimination)

3) Youth-based uprisings changing the political landscape (driven by unemployment)

But I think all these issues will play a wake-up call. Societies will become less self-centered, with less nationalism, less exceptionalism, and with more involvement and cooperation. There is already a rise in positive social activism. Kids are watching less TV and young people don't read newspapers, I love that! Lies are quickly demystified on places like Twitter.

The negative impact will matter mostly on how early people decide to get involved.

[http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshw...](http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshwater/embedded- water/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination) ($0.30/gallon in US, not viable)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8moePxHpvok](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8moePxHpvok) Adam Curtis on "Oh Dear"-ism

<comment><USER4> > Lies are quickly demystified on places like Twitter.

On the flipside they're also spreading quicker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This decade: 1\. Growing sovereign debt - it's not something democratic states seem to be able to solve. 2\. Weakened/collapsing states in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, etc. The Arab Spring showed that revolutions rarely lead to stable, prosperous regimes - more often, you just end up with years or decades of anarchy and instability. 3\. Global tilt: the relative decline of America, and it's effect on international geopolitics. Westerners will realise how much their preaching to the rest of the world was dependent on having the biggest army. Russia and China grow increasingly more daring. The BRICs build their alternative world bank (it's a real project, Google it) and an alternative international financial system starts to form.

100 years: 1\. Climate change/environmental damage. This won't kill us all, I think, but could majorly lower our quality of life. 2\. Overpopulation/mass migrations. Nigeria's population is predicted to be over a billion by the end of this century - an 8-fold increase. India's population growth isn't slowing down either. It does look as though humanity's population will peak at around 9/10 billion - but this will be predominantly within the most unstable regimes. Expect mass movement of refuges, further destabilising governments in advanced economies, fuelling further growth in mass surveillance, etc. 3\. The singularity. This one _could_ kill us all. Or it could become the AI philosopher-king that solves all our other problems.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't listen to _me_. Edge.org asks a question to a hundred or so clever people every year, and collects and posts the result. The 2013 question was "What should we be worried about?", and you can see the answers here: [http://edge.org/responses/q2013](http://edge.org/responses/q2013)

</comment><comment><USER7> ● Kim Kardashian divorces Kanye West and they fight over their child.

● One of the guys from "One Direction" comes out as gay.

● Kate Middleton's exposed nipple at an event sparks outrage from the Queen.

I think my predictions are a more realistic portrait of the things media and society find important. _For those who don 't get it: I'm trying to say that "people's ability to know what's important, care about what's important, and change what's important" are the 3 most pressing issues._

</comment><comment><USER8> 3 pressing issues for this decade:

1.) Automation, intelligent agents, and the end of wage labour as a means of redistributing money. Unconditional Basic Incomes will need to be phasing in by the end of the decade, or else we'll be in substantial trouble.

2.) Solar becoming cheaper than petrochemicals, increasingly high-density and fast-charging forms of electricity storage, and the very substantial disruptions (both positive and negative) this will entail. Geopolitically, Copper and Rare Earth Elements become the new oil.

3.) The collapsing legitimacy of Western Democracy as an institution, as it crumbles under the pressure of crony capitalism and a pervasive surveillance state. Western democracies will look more and more like China, rather than vice versa, prompting increasing Ukraine/Brazil-style unrest throughout the Western world (particularly acute if issue #1 is not dealt with). Many will propose new forms of governance (ala Liquid Democracy) but they won't be implemented within this timeframe.

Top three issues in 50 years:

1.) Climate change impacts will be maximally hitting the fan at this point. A significant migration away from flood- and storm-lashed coastlines. Adaptation measures (eg. seawall construction) will be big business; cowboy geoengineering efforts will be one of the main thing that starts wars.

2.) This will be right around peak population (~9.3 billion). Combined with pervasive automation, standards of living will have risen dramatically, particularly in Asia and Africa. Although technologies will generally be more efficient and ephemeral, the combination of rising population + rising wealth means that peak resource consumption will be right about now. Competition over resources will reach its peak.

3.) Driven in part by the above conflicts, and in part by the dramatically falling cost of spaceflight (~2 orders of magnitude cheaper than than today), it will now make sense to begin importing significant amounts of energy and material from beyond the Earth. The opening of this frontier will entail a host of political, legal, and commercial conflicts.

(#1 and #2 are really the killer issues here. This is the moment when technological civilisation gets has to thread the eye of its needle.)

Top three issues in 100 years:

1.) How to support a sharply ageing and decreasing global population?

2.) How to integrate sentient AIs and highly modified humans into society?

3.) Sovereignty for the small-but-growing off-world colonies?

<comment><USER9> I politely disagree with all 3 of your pressing issues for this decade.

1) Automation of human jobs has been happening since the beginning of the industrial revolution. It may end up being a serious problem for us, but I see no reason why the next ten years will be so different than the last 50. [Edit: Maybe it was a mistake to mention the industrial revolution. My main point is that why will the automation from 2014-2024 be significantly different than the automation from 2004-2014? I agree that automation will continue, but I am skeptical that we'll hit some breaking point.]

2) Solar is getting cheap, I agree. Nonetheless, there's no way in a mere ten years that we can manufacture TW of solar panels and upgrade the grid to handle them. The grid is extremely capital intensive, and power plants and power lines have lifetimes of ~50 years. Again, I agree with your assessment of the trend, but disagree with the timespan. 10 years from now things will look similar to how they look today.

3) Collapse of Western Democracy because of capitalism and pervasive surveillance? It hasn't happened in the last fifty years; what's different about the next ten?

<comment><USER10> For 1),

I think the difference is the mechanism of automation. The cotton gin meant the millions cotton pickers were out of cotton picking work, but this was being somewhat offset by increased low-skill, low-intelligence factory work elsewhere. Inventions disrupted and enabled greater individual productivity in single verticals of work: cotton picking, logistics (steam engines), circular saw, etc. These productivity innovations enabled a single person to do the work of dozens or hundreds.

Today, robots are removing the need for a human at all in not just one but effectively every low skill, low intelligence job. We're not far from a world where the great automated farms that feed the majority of the US are run by a few people making sure a swarm of end to end farming machines aren't broken down. This will happen in the next 10 years. Slightly different robots are already automating logistics in warehouses, and soon they'll be driving our commercial trucks. They'll fly our planes, build our buildings, our cars, our electronics. Oh, you say, but someone needs to build the robots. Robots build the robots. They build the robots that build the robots. There will need to be people who design and program and repair the robots, but none of that is low skill or low education; the cotton picker of today couldn't build or design or repair a robot. It's impossible to predict the future, but the nature of accelerating returns suggests that in the next 50 years we will replace almost every low skill job worth automating. Notable exceptions are human facing jobs in the service industry, though I expect innovation will change things pretty wildly there as well. Looking at you, accountants.

The TL;DR: the difference between today and the industrial revolution is that robotics is capable of automating almost any low skill job, rather than enabling greater productivity for humans doing the job.

<comment><USER9> My main point is why will the automation from 2014-2024 be so qualitatively different than the automation from 2004-2014 such that society will be forced to phase in unconditional basic incomes or else be in substantial trouble? (And to be clear this is the question for nkoren. I agree with everything that you said. :D)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Combination of mild temperatures and plenty of water is what makes the most difference towards a better life. Two rules:

1) Heating a room up is easy, cooling it down is hard. High temperatures exponentially decrease the productivity and/or increase the need for energy.

2) It is very hard to purify water and clean water is very scarce. Water is the most important dependency of life.

So my answer would be:

1) Lack of clean water supplies

2) Global warming

3) Disastrous combination of both

<comment><USER9> That's an interesting point about temperatures, but I don't think that's the main concern we should have about global warming. People living in Arizona don't seem to be significantly worse off than people living in North Dakota. And a few degrees will not change much in terms of heating and A/C. I think the real worry of global warming is what it will do to ecosystems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 1\. The biggest issue that we're going to encounter this decade onward is continuation of automation of jobs that real people used to have. As computers and machines continue to upend more and more of the labour market, we'll increasingly see an ageing population lose their jobs to robits and then just not have any skills that are relevant in the technocratic labour market.

Along with that, I'm unconvinced that schools (American public schools, at any rate) are doing enough to prepare today's children for tomorrow's economy. Some big names have come out in support of more techno-centric curricula, specifically stressing the importance of learning to code, but I feel that will not be enough.

Instead, we need to be reinvesting in art and creativity (along with more robust rosters of STEM classes) because, as of right now, true and good art cannot really be supplanted by our new machine overlords. I want to live in a future where the artist coming out of university is viewed as a greater boon to society than a CS major, because quite frankly I don't think that making code that can do in a tenth of a second what used to take a flesh'n'bone person ten seconds to do is really super important to humanity.

2\. Somewhat related, I think that the gap between the rich and poor is again going to come to a head. Occupy wall street was a bunch of foolish people thinking that being upset would be enough to affect change. I think that the next wave of this sentiment will not be so naive. In my opinion, the way to "fix" this is to start taxing ALL income and capital gains of over $150,000 at 20% scaling up to 35% for when somebody is making more than a half million dollars per annum. That money would be, for real, just given out to the rest of the people, no strings attached. Tying back to my first point: the labour market won't need as many labourers (especially those who can't computer good) but I don't think that we should hold it against the people who were trapped in the wrong time for working. This is, of course, wishful thinking because congress's policies are dictated much more by money than what would be good for the general population.

3\. I still don't think that the shit has hit the fan in terms of the Snowden disclosures. I think that the revelation of the shameful acts of US intelligence gathering has irreversibly altered America's place in the world in ways that won't become apparent for a good while yet. I believe that we're starting to get to better grips with what a global communication/data infrastructure means for society as a whole, and a big challenge will be defining, for the global population, what should and should not be done with this technology.

<comment><USER13> _in my opinion, the way to "fix" this is to start taxing ALL income and capital gains of over $150,000 at 20% scaling up to 35% for when somebody is making more than a half million dollars per annum._ This would be more trouble than its worth and confuses real wealth with financial wealth. Modern fiat money is essentially a digital currency controlled by the banking system and congress. Its like bitcoin with Congress and the banks authoring the algorithm. It follows that quantity of money is never a problem in a fiat money system, its the algorithm for its creation/allocation that is the problem.

Economics is about maximizing consumption and the goal should be to give all people the opportunity to consume what they need. Real wealth = the goods and services that are produced and consumed in the economy and ultra rich people do not consume very much of it. Yeah, they hoard financial assets -thereby hurting the economy- which tends to reduce circulation of money which leads to reduction of income for everyone else. Yes, this income leak can be solved by taxation and re-distribution. But this is politically painful. Maybe it would be better to give on to Caesar what is Caesear's and let the rich keep their hordes because money sitting in a bank doing nothing is irrelevant. Would be better to focus on distributing wealth to the middle and lower classes on a much larger scale through government spending and reduction of taxes. Proposals 1) Payroll taxes to be paid by Fed for workers. 2) Income or Job Guarantee program with living wage and full benefits. 3) Massive federal infrastructure spending on a WWII like scale. Triple down on the deficit. 4) Regulate, Regulate , Regulate. Get money out of politics. 5) Online/Mobile voting system mandate. 6) De-financialize the economy: Return banking system to pre 1980's model where banks make loans and hold them. Strict controls on financial leverage. No borrowing using financial assets as collateral. 7) Tax rentier income higher than earned income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'll focus on what I know, just one issue:

We'll run out of food. In about 2025 the global population will start to surpass what can be sustained by the available arable land in the world. We can't use more fertilisers or water (because most crops under intensive cultivation are already close to their theoretical maximum yields). We can't just use more land because it's not suitable for agriculture because of salinity, contamination, substrate or climate.

We are essentially fucked: unless we can increase the maximum yield potential of a whole suite of staple crops by ~50%, or make about 50% more land available for food production, famine starts to become a really big problem. It hasn't been that big of a problem since the mid-1900s. Famine means war, disease, death. Some of the most atrocious things humans have ever done were done because of famine.

There are some promising scientific efforts to raise potential crop yields underway, but as someone working on them I can tell you they probably won't be ready in time without massive changes in science funding or a series of lucky breakthroughs. It's still worth trying really, really hard, because this is the least painful way to prevent disaster.

An alternative is to completely restructure the way we produce food. Vertical farming is attractive if we can find the raw materials to make it happen, but that won't be feasible until people are already starving.

Another alternative is for everyone to stop eating meat. Animals are ~5-10x less efficient to produce in terms of input resources per calorie output than plants. I hope this happens. Cows first, then sheep, then pigs. Wiping out those three would have us covered.

After about 2050 the world population peaks and starts to decrease, then things get easier. But there's a good chance a whole shitload of people die very young, very painfully in the meantime.

<comment><USER15> Max world population will cap at 9,000,000,000 in 2050, not so much more than the 7,000,000,000 we have today. In actual risk of starvation, changing some meat farming to plants would solve supply issues pretty quick.

<comment><USER16> Assuming climate change doesn't get the better of a major percentage of our harvests.

<comment><USER17> Our current rate of climate change is a terrible thing, don't get me wrong.

But as the planet warms, our current(mostly depleted) cropland will produce less while places closer to the poles will start being cultivated for similar crops.

<comment><USER16> Let's hope it will work out like that.

A warmer world in equilibrium would not be the problem; our main problem is that we are set up for this configuration as stable (location of cities, local knowledge, crops, culture, ..) and it will be hard to adapt on the way to a new equilibrium, because the conditions are constantly changing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't know enough about food, water, antibiotics etc. but I do know a lot about finance, especially US based finance. Here are the issues that will be hugely pressing and very difficult to solve in the next 10 years.

1) Retiring baby boomers have no savings, retirements and no plan for retirement. Over the next 10 years, a lot of people will be entering retirement age in the US with no plan for surviving. Demand for government services will increase dramatically, many people will be very upset when they find out that they barely have enough money to eat.

2) Student loans should cause a drag on the economy as many, many young Americans will be pressured by paying nearly 10% of their income (which represents a much larger percentage of disposable income). Savings rates will be negatively impacted as well.

These two issues have no known solution and will both be huge underlying issues facing Americans in the next 10 years. They are certain, not hypothetical.

<comment><USER19> The internet says there is about $1 trillion in outstanding student loans. If you assume that they are repaid fairly quickly, that means something like $2 trillion of payments.

That's enormous, but only in the ballpark of $15,000 per working person in the U.S. Spread it over a decade and it's still not a payment I would wish on anybody for no reason, but entirely manageable (and presumably only a portion of the payment represents an actual economic drag, some people get quite some benefit from schooling).

<comment><USER18> 1\. Why would you assume they will be repaid fairly quickly?

2\. $15,000 per working person in the US is a massive number of dollars per person. The medium US income is only about $50,000. Even if you spread the number out over 10 years (which would of course also increase the total interest paid), you are talking about $1,500 a year, which would be roughly 100% of people's discretionary income.

3\. The number is growing and will continue to grow forever which means that the drag increases overtime, not that it gets paid off.

4\. The student loans any individual borrows may individually benefit them relative to others, but there is no reason to believe that the total revenue (salary) grows at the same rate as the drag caused by the increase in debt service on a macro scale.

Its $1 trillion + interest that will drag on the economy for many, many, many years. You can't look at the trees in the forest to rationalize away the problem this huge debt load will have on the economy.

<comment><USER19> Well, I didn't worry too much about that aspect of it since you had already said 10% of income towards them.

But now you are complaining that $1500 is too much.

<comment><USER18> The bottom line is that a trillion dollars and growing is a massive drag on the economy. There is no way around it. As the number grows it becomes a bigger and bigger problem. We need to fix our college education system to make it much, much more affordable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This decade? For America?

1\. The continuing deliberation about how much privacy is useful, and for what.

2\. The continuing erosion of the middle class.

3\. Legacy Rails applications.

</comment><comment><USER21> 1\. disappearing democracy due to totalitarian levels of spying everywhere

2\. riots over collapsing economies

3\. education costs

50yrs Potable water worth more than gold in some countries

100yrs Potable water priceless

<comment><USER22> Why, exactly, can't we desalinate the oceans, if potable water really becomes an issue?

<comment><USER23> We will. If you're rich, you'll be able to afford to drink it. Nestle will likely be one of the providers, and there will be others just like them. [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nestle+water+ceo](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nestle+water+ceo)

<comment><USER24> Desalinated water is cheap enough to drink if you're anywhere above abject poverty, really: much less than $1 per cubic meter in Israel and Singapore, for example. Literally fractions of a cent for a litre. It's everything else we use potable water for that makes desalination expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Over the next 25 years or so

1\. The continuing destruction of the worlds Ocean/Aquatic ecosystems. We are far more dependent on free flowing clean water and the ecosystems tied to it than most realize.

2\. The coming explosion of biological technology. This could be massively positive or negative depending on how it shakes out.

3\. Revolution/Information control wars. Arab Spring, NSA scandals, and groups like Anonymous all seem like a prelude to me. The Internet was a game changer in numerous ways. On the internet real groups of people can have massive power and in part effect real change. A lot of people are starting to see that power and want to control it.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's plenty of issues to deal with, others have highlighted some that I feel will be important, but what I hope happens in the next minute is we realise the issues will not be fixed by top down design but by the coordinated actions of those at the ground level, i.e. by us. We may not have directly caused the issues, but it's still up to us to fix them.

I feel that what Kapura said about the Occupy movement is partly true, I do believe it did some good in raising awareness, but being pissed off is not that effective in building positive change. The whole street protest thing is, in my opinion, more about what feels right than what works, and it's time for us to be pragmatic.

Awareness building is important, but what's even more important is building a viable alternative to our current system, a viable alternative that doesn't require strongly held political beliefs in order to be compelling. Part (and I should stress only 'part') of that viable alternative will be technology that serves the needs of the many whilst helping us to have a better symbiotic relationship with the world we all live in. Start thinking of what that tech might be like. As Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

</comment><comment><USER27> In time spans like a decade, what people will think of as most important will be freedom issues (democratic and anti-democratic movements around the world, individual privacy concerns, efforts by religious groups to enforce their preferred societal norms).

In the longer run, the issues that threaten humanity as a whole, rather than as individuals, are as important. Things like: (1) Water/energy availability, both singly and combined. (2) Global climate change. (3) Local environmental quality (air, water, food). Of course, all of these are linked, but when working on solutions it still makes sense to think about them individually.

</comment><comment><USER28> Water, Water, and Water.

Despite the press we'll be fine for energy and climate.

<comment><USER19> Energy and water are largely fungible.

<comment><USER29> I don't think we can trivially turn (fresh) water into energy (yet?), so I wouldn't use that word. It's true that with enough energy, we can generally get some water purified (and distributed).

<comment><USER19> Fair enough, but if you aren't worried about energy you shouldn't be very worried about water.

<comment><USER28> The problem is that salt water is not available everywhere. Pumping water everywhere will be a problem.

<comment><USER29> A problem mostly solved by abundant energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 1\. The Ocean is broken. [http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean- is-broke...](http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1848433/the-ocean-is-broken/) 2\. Rampant deforestation and extinction of several species that we will never see again. 3\. Population explosion (in long 50 years) 4\. Pollution of air, see and all form of terrestrial water sources.

</comment><comment><USER23> Eventually:

Water: too much in some places, not enough in other places.

Increased starvation and disease, from drought, mono-cultural industrial production of food from the likes of Monsanto and ADM, and constant and spreading low grade war from national militaries above and local militarized police forces below.

Economic catastrophe caused by revolution or effective dissolution of the United States and other current economic leaders.

</comment><comment><USER31> Climate, inequality and death/unbalance of ecosystems (and their respective consequences) for 50/100 years. For the near term, economic crash, balkanization of internet and death of IP agreements between countries. Somewhere in the middle the formation or at least becoming more evident of new country blocks and alliances (maybe tied with how internet will get balkanized)

</comment><comment><USER32> 1\. The ability of people to not live in fear of their government. Regardless of whether or not there is an actual risk of something unfair happening to a person at the hands of their government, their police, etc., if people live in fear of it, they will become sheltered, paranoid individuals.

2\. The ability of people to not live in fear of their community. I think people sequester themselves into Facebook echo chambers because they don't know that there is nothing to fear of people who don't 100% agree with them.

3\. The ability of people to not live in fear of themselves. The ability to stop placing faith in the systems that others provide us, to act as a sovereign individual and find ones own path, to take personal "risks" (which, certainly for 1st world citizens, don't much amount to real risk) to be able to do more meaningful, productive work that is more beneficial to our fellow man. We aren't going to solve the worlds problems by listening to our parents and our guidance counselors and going to a "good" college and getting a "good" job. The only way to save the world is to ignore the advice of the people who broke it in the first place.

It's a pretty easy formula. Just eliminate fear.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hopefully, diseases of the rich -- things like obesity, dementia and old age.

I say "hopefully" because I'm not wholly convinced that many countries will continue to be rich. I really hope so.

</comment><comment><USER34> Read this: [http://www.globalissues.org/](http://www.globalissues.org/)

To know what issues we will encounter in the future you need to know what issues exist now.

</comment><comment><USER35> \- Fair natural resource utilization (water, petrol, etc.)

\- Increasing political instability in totalitarian regimes

\- America will struggle with not having such a high standard of living relative to the rest of the world.

</comment><comment><USER36> 1\. Money as the driving force (instead of knowledge)

2\. Competitive mentality (instead of collaborative)

3\. Collateral damage caused by 1. and 2. (instead of care for our fellow human beings and our environment)

</comment><comment><USER37> In 10 years time the most popular languages will still include C, C++, Java, C# and friends.

</comment><comment><USER38> \- Global Sovereign Debt / Currency Crisis

\- The US Police State

\- Increased Chinese, Japanese rivalry/aggression

</comment><comment><USER39> \- Mixing disease consequences for causes and seeing pain killer drugs as a cure.

</comment><comment><USER40> 1\. Weather 2\. Water availability 3\. Antibiotic effectiveness

</comment><comment><USER41> Politics, politics, politics.

Like the last 50 decades at least...

</comment><comment><USER42> 50 years: global shortage of oil and natural gas

<comment><USER9> I think your answer is most likely to be correct. Oil won't disappear today or tomorrow, but it's very hard to imagine the technology that needs to be developed so that oil is still cheap and plentiful in 2100. BP has some good reports on this issue ([http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy- econom...](http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy- economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy-2013.html)). If we don't solve the energy problem, there is a reasonable chance that humans in 2100 will have a worse standard of living than those today. Seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> 1\. Global warming

2\. Lack of privacy

3\. Inequality (the 0.1%)

</comment><comment><USER44> Money, Money, Money</comment>


Apple Employees reveal the truth - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-confess-all-the-worst-things-about-working-at-apple-2014-4

<comment><USER2> I don't think anything in that article is particularly surprising. Apple is incredibly concerned with secrecy, and they share a lot of dysfunctions with other huge tech companies. Yep.</comment>


Docker Built-In Orchestration Ready for Production: Docker 1.12 Goes GA - <AUTHOR> https://blog.docker.com/2016/07/docker-built-in-orchestration-ready-for-production-docker-1-12-goes-ga/ <comment><USER2> Is there any good reason to use this over the much more mature Kubernetes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Easier to go from dev to prod ?

<comment><USER3> Not really, though. It's super easy to run a local kube instance (now even cross-platform [1]). In fact, it's much easier at the moment to spin up prod environments for Kubernetes, so I'd argue that Kube still wins in the dev->prod arena.

[1] [https://github.com/micro-kube/micro-kube](https://github.com/micro- kube/micro-kube)

<comment><USER4> But you have to learn a bunch of new words (manifests, pods, controllers, etc.) and while spinning up new prod environments is relatively straightforward, maintaining/upgrading one is not. Kubernetes is still a lot more mature though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Given that Flynn came out with 1.0 the other day, would really appreciate it if someone with knowledge of Flynn and Docker Orchestration / Docker compose describe the differences.

<comment><USER6> If I'm not mistaken, it's apples and oranges. Docker Orchestration is closer to the Kubernetes/Diego/Mesos level, in that it's assigning opaque workloads to machines in a distributed cluster.

Flynn is more of a PaaS: it has additional logic to wire up your app, inject services, route traffic and so on.

I work for Pivotal, we donate the majority of engineering on Cloud Foundry, so I wind up peeking at lots of other cloud platforms that are emerging in this space. For example, Red Hat dropped their own code and built OpenShift 3 around Kubernetes.

For Cloud Foundry, we don't use any of these HN-famous systems currently. We built and use Warden/Garden because Docker didn't exist at the time. We built and use the Diego orchestrator because Kubernetes, Mesos and co didn't exist at the time. There's a lot of convergent evolution occurring in this area because lots of smart people see the same problems and arrive at similar ideas.

As for scaling up, Nomad currently holds the benchmark porn crown: they posted a 1-million number a few months ago. That said, it depends a lot on what you're counting. We've have Diego running at 10,000 genuinely genuine application instances -- full routing, full logging, full service injection -- in production for some time now. There's work to push the official-we-can- sell-it-to-F1000s-and-not-get-sued limit to 250,000.

Sure, there are are companies who need more than 250,000 copies of their apps running and it may be a bit longer before Cloud Foundry can meet their needs. I mean, I _guess_ they can probably afford to run _two_ copies of Cloud Foundry, if they _have_ to. They might have to hire another operator. Ruinous.

Anyhow. We built an early version of Diego that was to my mind architecturally very elegant but, as I am given to understand, fell prey to a stampeding herd problem as we began to approach heavier workloads and simulations showed it would only get worse unless we went to something simpler.

I'm not sure I agree with the argument in this post that Docker's approach is particularly novel in this area -- separating workers and managers seems pretty standard to me. Diego breaks the work into more than a dozen cooperating subsystems, variously distributed into brains and cells. Diego relies on etcd, which Docker's engineers consider to be an operational overhead. That makes sense because of Docker's engineering assumptions (that someone has _only_ installed Docker), so they kinda sorta _have_ to be autarkic on this matter.

Cloud Foundry -- and by extension Diego -- can rely on BOSH to make operational management of etcd or any other service very close to a non-issue, while pushing that engineering effort out of the core product. I heard recently that a standard OSS Cloud Foundry has 90 (ninety) running processes. I never knew this because I've never noticed, because the upgrades are relatively trivial and almost offensively reliable.

Docker say that read optimisation is a major win from using an inbuilt store, but this presupposes a read-heavy design. A lot of what Diego does is push that work out of the central manager towards the edges. Mesos achieves a similar trick (though it pushes back to the consumer, rather than to the executor). Originally Diego's approach was was more decentralised, with a full auction model (meaning that the central orchestrator didn't need to update _any_ node information at all), but as I said, the stampeding herd of bids on new jobs or processes made it hard to scale. (I am not sure what the alternative was, I'm just an interested spectator.)

Reminder: I work for Pivotal, insofar as Docker is turning back into a PaaS company, we're becoming competitors. I don't work on Diego and I never have, so my understanding of architecture and the course of its evolution is based on snippets of conversation and distant fan-boying. My understanding of Docker's new architecture is from hastily skimming a single blogpost and includes the industry-standard level of heavily and unfairly discounting every other engineer's intelligence and foresight.

So take everything I said under careful consideration.</comment></comment>


Tell HN: Object365 - Everyday of your life in a JSON object - <AUTHOR>

I am currently working on a web application, but have been meaning to pursue one of my other ideas when I finish. I figured I would share it now to help me think of ideas as I go forward. Basically the idea of the site is to store everything about your day in a JSON object for a year.
Why you ask? Well, it would be cool to identify and trend habits, go back in time and see what you did on a given day and whatever else you could think to do with the data. How would you get it? I kind of worked some of that out.
I set the whole site up in phases: - 2 weeks = Voice memo everything I do - 1 week = Go through data and identify specifics to track based on habits. Build application to take in data and create a JSON object.
- 3 months = Voice memo trackable items and enter them into application
At the end of all this you should have a decent result set of data that you could query on using MongoDB or something else. Obviously this would not benefit everyone, but I know it would me and hell, I am interested in the end results. If others are interested then please share your thoughts so when I pursue this I could bake them in. <comment><USER2> The voice memo part kinda lost me.</comment>


Introducing Apps for µTorrent - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bittorrent.com/2010/05/13/introducing-apps-for-µtorrent/

<comment><USER2> uTorrent was successful because it was light, small, fast and did one thing very well. Bundling games, video and antivirus apps with it could hardly be more antithetical.

<comment><USER3> They write "Apps for µTorrent is a brand new web-based extensions framework that makes it easy for users to get more and do more with µTorrent without compromising the client's renowned lightness and speed. "

Let's hope they deliver on that last part...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I or someone else can use this to solve the problem of moving data files, I'll be a happy camper.

This is a HUGE issue for me, as I'd like to consolidate torrents split across 3 drives (I realize I shouldn't have done things that way in the first place... but it happened organically)

Since most of them are on private trackers, I don't just want to stop sharing them, and moving 50+ torrent/data files is currently a nightmare.

It's on the current suggestion list ([http://utorrentideas.uservoice.com/forums/47263-general/sugg...](http://utorrentideas.uservoice.com/forums/47263-general/suggestions/714604-have- built-in-one-click-move-data-files-and-mov?ref=comments)).

<comment><USER5> in uTorrent, copying the data over and (in the right click menu once a torrent is stopped) going to advanced > set download location should force a recheck at the new location.

<comment><USER4> Right, but I don't really want to do that 100+ times. I realize its possible... but I just don't have the patience for it. Why can't I do it in bulk?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's number two on this list:

<http://utorrentideas.uservoice.com/forums/47263-general>

I couldn't care less about the first (Deluge > * ), but I'm glad to see they're listening to feedback.

</comment><comment><USER7> Between this and some of their other projects like live streaming (<http://www.utorrent.com/labs>) it seems as if they're aiming for a broader vision of peer-based networking, as opposed to just file distribution.

</comment><comment><USER8> My first thought was that this must be a joke at Facebook's expense.

</comment><comment><USER9> An extension that delivers similar functionality to PeerGuardian (<http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/>) would go down very well I bet.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why do you need to be able to build apps for this?

<comment><USER6> [http://utorrentideas.uservoice.com/forums/47263-general/sugg...](http://utorrentideas.uservoice.com/forums/47263-general/suggestions/712988-create- plugins-for-utorrent)</comment></comment>


Show HN: LJSON: JSON extended with pure functions - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MaiaVictor/LJSON <comment><USER2> I think it's a lovely idea, with an interesting implementation.

Obligatory HN style comment: It might be wise to strengthen the description from "pure" functions to "pure and terminating". I've not had time to form an opinion on whether the restrictions are sufficient to ensure this (JavaScript's evaluation rules are...complex). However, the informal specification of this being a lambda calculus with multiple arguments isn't strong enough - that would allow non-termination on load, which is not something you really want in your data serialisation format.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no protection against non-termination. For example, an user could give you this function:

        f = (function (x){ return x(x); })

Now, if you call `f(function(f){return function(x){ return f(f(x)) }})`, it'll not halt. But there are good principled ways to work around that, such as adding a type system like System F. That would discard 100% of the programs that halt, at the cost of also losing some programs that do halt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Fun project. From examining the source code, they are using the technique that can be considered a kind of higher order abstract syntax (HOAS). In particular, LJSON can be fooled by so called exotic terms. E.g.

      LJSON.stringify(function(v) { return v; })

evaluates to the string

      (function(v0){return v0})

While

      LJSON.stringify(function(v) { return v(null) } )

Evaluates to the string

      (function(v0){return "v0"})

In the latter case, v(null) was able to examine the variable that stringify injects into the function. In this case, v(null) is the name of the injected variable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good catch. Any suggestion how I could improve the usage of null for determining the end of a call list?

<comment><USER3> Actually there are other problems that are caused by the fact that you're not really doing HOAS, but something even more difficult, namely trying to infer the function by passing in values.

For example

      LJSON.stringify(function(v) { if (v == 0) { return "zero"; } else { return "one"; } })

Evaluates to the string

      (function(v0){return "one"})

The only way to avoid both these issues, is to inspect the code of a function f using f.toString(). However you would need to consider the scope where f was defined.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, fair enough. The user should avoid using native JS constructs on the code to be stringified, though - it is an interesting/useful side effect of the method that you are able to, but ideally you would define your functions using only the pure λ-calculus grammar.

Thanks for figuring that out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without being able to call pure functions within pure functions, what use is this beyond the trivial simple examples? Couldn't it be possible to pass a "this" argument as the current JSON node and have it traverse the tree or something? For example:

      {
        "math": {
          "sin": function(x) {...}
        },
        "numerics": {
          "sin2": function(x) {
            return this.parent.math.sin(x)
          },
          "parent": [automatically inserted by parser]
        }
      }

<comment><AUTHOR> There are many possibilities since you can pass any program/algorithm through LJSON while still having a good level of safety. You could it, for example, to allow your users to pick an AI strategy for their bots in a game, among billion of other things. But there are many restrictions, so you can't just write arbitrary JS functions. You have to design them much more carefully by requesting the proper primitives, using the technique I explained with the _hypothenuse_ example. Of cours, you could just request `window` as a primitive and get everything, but yea...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neat concept.

It reminds me of how JSON started - as just a string representation of a javascript object and parsing JSON was as simple as evaling it.

Once it picked up steam, it got a formal definition and a parser.

If serializing pure functions ever takes off, it will have to follow the same route - without using clever javascript tricks to make it work.

Still, very cool concept.

</comment><comment><USER6> This would be interesting, except JavaScript is a terrible language for this. At the minimum I think you'd want all the arguments and return values to be strictly typed. Otherwise you can't for example determine how much memory to allocate for the returned value. The big strength of JSON is that the encoder and decoder can be written by anyone in any language fairly easily. I've used it in JS, Python, PHP, and C, and every time it's been super easy because the format is so simple.

What would actually be cool is to add type hints to JSON. That way we could conceivably add things like date types to it fairly easily.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is something I'd wanted to do, and I'm glad someone else had the same idea. Lots of exciting possibilities.

Something important that needs doing is strictly defining the JavaScript subset used. As simple as possible, ideally, in keeping with the JSON spirit. This would mean you could then safely implement that subset in other languages. Imagine serialising a PHP function into λJSON and running it from JavaScript, or vice-versa!

</comment><comment><USER8> Neat idea, mutable in serialization format and functions...

We are a step close to the YAML fiasco that has crippled rails.

/me grabs popcorns, and will likely enjoy to watch the world burns.

<comment><AUTHOR> Mutable what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I definitely see some uses to it as a way to pass client code to the server safely. What would stop the client from using global variable though?

<comment><USER10> There are no free terms in any of these LJSON functions, since all the terms are explicitly named in the arguments. Globals would presumably get shadowed and so would not be captured.</comment></comment>


How Wired.com Tracked the iPhone Finder - <AUTHOR> http://brianxchen.tumblr.com/post/565083430/how-wired-com-tracked-the-iphone-finder

<comment><USER2> Step 1: a comment on Facebook observed by a Wired intern leads to a probe of the guy's friends and recent groups.

Given the latest spritz of "I'm leaving Facebook" posts on HN, this is a coincidentially relevant tale of how it was used to track somebody down against his wishes. Even more interesting was that the timing of his profile deletion was an indicator to Wired that he was involved in something abnormal.

Some of you seem to regret ever opening a Facebook account; you can count Hogan solidly among your numbers. This story is a memorable counter to the claim that in the new era of social networking, people want everything to be public all the time. Perhaps you might not care too much about your privacy, but one day might come along where you really need to and it's too late.

<comment><USER3> IMHO, this fits nicely under Eric Schmidt's philosophy that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." After all, it's the morally questionable act of profiting from someone's mistake that's the ultimate cause of his troubles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> FTA: I hope it sends a message that journalism is still very much alive,

Wow... why don't I see a hue and cry regarding the name revelation by wired.com here. When Gizmodo released the name of Gary powell it was called a cheap shot... But stalking someone using facebook and revealing their name to the world which definitely could affect the person's career is suddenly fair game.

<comment><USER5> Has this person been _convicted_ of a crime? No? Well now... Does anybody remember Richard Jewell?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell>

<comment><USER2> On the other hand, the guy's lawyer does admit he was the one that found the phone, it's not likely Wired found the wrong person.

I don't think Wired is making any assumptions about the legal status of what he did.

Does that make it any less freaky that trawling Facebook is what led to this scoop? Well, admittedly no.

<comment><USER5> To me, "trawling Facebook" means using publicly available information. Pretending to be interested in friendship is "social engineering," which is a polite way of saying "lying."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A telling Facebook comment on the wall of a former Wired intern who still had connections to Wired. Had he not done that, he might still be underground.

<comment><USER7> > But even so, the comment was vague (a single word) and not enough to draw a > conclusion

What was the single word?

Payday? Money? "Stolen?!"?, Nevermore?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First step, you get lucky. I mean, once you have a name and a social group, you're already 99% of the way there.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how many lies were told in order to get this scoop? "Hi, I'm a friend of Brian's, do you know...?"

<comment><USER10> Hi I'm that intern.

No lies involved. We got an email at Wired about the phone (pre-Gizmodo story) and ignored it. After the story we came back to the email, I looked it up on Google, found his real name associated to a post on a forum, searched it on Facebook and, for some very odd reason, he accepted a friends request from me.

I guess the lesson here is not to talk (or accept friends requests) from strangers.

<comment><USER5> You dishonestly pretended to be interested in friendship with someone and you tell us that he lesson is not to accept friendship requests from strangers?

I take the lesson as "Beware, even the nicest people will rationalize dishonesty."</comment></comment></comment>


There is something strange about universe scientists find after mapping cosmos - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/universe-map-dark-matter-homogenous-kids-standard-model-einstein-a9647186.html <comment><USER2> Couldn't a quicker rate of expansion explain the missing "clumping"?

</comment><comment><USER3> We are in it. That's pretty strange.</comment>


The Impoverished Ransomware Superhero of Normal, Illinois - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/the-ransomware-superhero-of-normal-illinois <comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 Sounds like a genuinely nice guy and I hope he gets the financial support he seems to need right now however something in the article caught my eye - "Then they [FBI Agents] began requesting lists of IP addresses that had uploaded files to ID Ransomware, which could help identify victims, as well as ransom notes and other material."

From the ID Ransomware site - "Any email addresses or BitCoin addresses found in files uploaded to ID Ransomware may be stored and shared with trusted third parties or law enforcement. No personally identifiable data is stored." If he is supplying IP addresses and copies of ransom notes without consent well, yeah maybe the web site should make it a bit clearer that it's not _just_ email and bitcoin info he shares. A further quote a bit further down reads "He tips them (the FBI) off, for instance, when a ransom note or extension on a file uploaded to the site identifies the targeted business." Still, seems like his heart is in the right place so I'll close with a more positive snippet - "Gillespie hopes that someday his services will no longer be needed, because businesses and people will have learned proper cybersecurity. "If the world had backups, then we wouldn't have ransomware," he said."</comment>


How SEO Killed Online Reviews - <AUTHOR> http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/how-seo-killed-online-reviews/ <comment><USER2> Gamification of SEO killed online reviews.

More and more people are "understanding" how SEO works and they're simply manipulating it. By ranking early for a keyword that has yet to gain popularity, they stand a chance at getting a lot of traffic for a short period of time, early on. One can assume this is to earn ad revenue from the traffic but it's obviously not a sustainable method as the more reputable sites will gain favorable rankings quickly. These are the same people that will earn 100's of $$ from their website per month, and sell it on Flippa.com for 6-12x their monthly income. Then they build a new site, and repeat.

I am currently working in the automotive distribution industry, and pretty much any automotive site you find is using this method of maniplation. It sucks.

An example; Just type in 2014 BMW 3 Series, 2015 BMW 3 Series and 2016 BMW 3 Series to see people using this method of maniplation.

<comment><USER3> As SEO is blamed, so one could also blame the existance of search engines themselves. What this really has to do with is "meeting consumer demand."

It just happens, not by coincidence, that there is a lot less competition in areas where the end product doesn't actually exist.

Last month I tried to reverse look up a phone number with Intelius. They tried to upsell me a bunch of monthly subscriptions, and then told me the phone number wasn't actually in their system but they would look for it. I was to expect an answer in 3 days. 9 days later they said they couldn't find it and refunded my charge.

Intelius knew they wouldn't be able to have that number. But, they knew there was an X% chance I'd sign up for their monthly recurring service; something I suspect would not have been refunded.

There are plenty of other businesses making money selling things that don't exist. Some are arguably legitimate, such as Kickstarter. Others, such as pyramid schemes, are quite less so.

<comment><USER2> In my opinion, you're not entirely wrong nor are you right.

For one, I don't think that ranking for 2015 BMW 3 Series (my former example) is meeting any demand. The car does not even exist yet; I'm not even sure if BMW would even be working on it at the moment. How can that be meeting demand?

The example you gave with intelius is not entirely wrong persay; as they did "try" to perform a valuable service in the end. However, what if a random nefarious individual started ranking for non-existant phone numbers, took your money, and ran?

Gamification of SEO is a slippery slope. Sometimes it's useful and other times it goes horribly wrong. It comes down human intentions and search engine sorting out the good vs the bad, I guess. I have not yet known a machine to determine human intention.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't really matter whether intent can be divined, because perverse incentives can be engineered out of the system if the resources and will are present.

Did Intelius "try," or did they get free 9 day loan?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't see how SEO is to blame for this. Shitty publications will always write inaccurate, linkbait headlines...or "eye-bait", before the Internet existed.

This gives an opening to sites that put real work into their editorial content. Unless I'm trying to get a gauge of some random non-heavily-promoted product (like earphones) that I find on sale...I will always go to a trusted site for review. Life is too short to parse through random reviews from untrusted parties as it is, even if none of them are "fake" reviews.

EDIT:

Here's an example. DPReview is almost always the last major reviewer to cover a camera. Yet they are at the top of the search results for pretty much every camera they review

[https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=0&source...](https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=review+canon5d%20mark%20III#hl=en&sclient=psy- ab&q=review+canon+5d+mark+III&oq=review+canon+5d+mark+III)

<comment><USER6> There's a link to DPReview in the footer of every single Amazon.com page. If that's not a good signal for a search engine then I don't know what is.

<comment><USER7> Huh, so there is. Amazon bought them in 2007. I've been reading DPReview constantly, but I never knew that.

<comment><USER5> And I've also learned that today. So I guess they're not the best example here...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazon review fraud is rampant, and with enough effort, they'll do something about it. I've worked w/teams there who, over time, develop very complex queries on the back end, and use these to remove sellers who violate policy. There are all kinds of additional tricks sellers or manufacturers use to make their reviews look legit, such as using Amazon gift cards to prevent tracing back to a specific credit card holder, and to ensure the "Verified Amazon Purchase" indicator shows on the review. Helpful votes are crucial and there seem to be very complex rules behind which votes get counted and which don't. Some combination of accounts being related via credit card on file, IP address, possibly length of user account history, etc. One difficulty for Amazon is that their community review policing department is disconnected from their seller performance team. My company's work with them has improved the communication, as well as the realization that user accounts that leave fraudulent reviews cannot be treated as merely rogue buyer community members, but rather have to be tied back to sellers and manufacturers who are the real benefactors of these fraudulent (positive or negative) reviews.

We've come a long way from manufacturers blatantly paying people for positive reviews. [http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive- belki...](http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belkins- development-rep-is-hiring-people-to-write-fake-positive-amazon-reviews/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't really see how this relates to SEO at all. If anything, this is link bait.

It has more to do with publications writing unsupported reviews for products trying to get clicks. This is no different than tabloids printing sensationalized headlines to get eyes when you're standing in line at the grocery store.

I just ran a search for 'Nintendo Wii U' and the whole front page contains none of these types of articles reviewing the Wii U. The front page has articles from ABC News, e3, Youtube, Amazon, etc. If someone is searching for 'Nintendo Wii U Reviews' and the results return the only page's available that display themselves as 'reviews' then who's fault is that? The searcher, who is uninformed enough to not realize that the Wii U can't be reviewed yet because it is not available, or Google, who assumes the searcher wants to find reviews for the Wii U, regardless of their validity?

If I search for 'aliens are real' I get results that support my search query which assumes aliens are real. It's not Google's job to decide if 'aliens are real' or not. It's job is to return relevant results for what I searched for. If I want 'Wii U Reviews' then I'll get reviews, regardless if they are valid or not.

<comment><USER10> Of course it has to do with SEO. The reason to write those fake reviews is not (only) to get people reading those before the product is out, but mostly to have better google rankings (page age seems to have some weight).

<comment><USER9> This might be true, but once the Wii U starts to receive legitimate reviews from credible sources, these 'faux' reviews will be crushed by the authority of Gamespot, CNET, etc. providing real reviews that are accumulating great number links. Right now, these fake reviews are killing the SERPs because there is nothing else to return for reviews of the Wii.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When you're looking to buy a product that isn't the kind of thing reviewed by sites you already know, it can be hard to find where credible sources are. What I generally try to do is start by adding "forum" to my search query with the goal of finding a group of hobbyists somewhere. If I can find a discussion among hobbyists that is somewhat related to the product I want, then often they will mention the sites they're reading or buying from. Usually there will be a couple of brands that get fought over, and if nothing else it can help discover better search terms.

<comment><USER12> you don't need to add forum, in Google click more on the left side, and then select "discussions"...and it'll limit the results to just forums/message boards etc

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "For consumers my main advice would be to find a website that you can trust and stick with it."

This was one of the founding principles of the slashtag system at Blekko.com. Pure algorithmic search fails in highly contested search queries because of the people trying to game results. The idea is that if you've got a slashtag with your favorite review sites in it you can have that auto-boosted in your regular search results and 'ungame' the gamers.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, the best SEO coup I ever made was when I covered a news story a few days before it happened and got 40,000 hits because I ranked #1 for it when it got on TV news.

(How did I cover it before it happened? Because this event was one of a series of events, and I had covered an earlier event at the same place involving the same people that wasn't quite so outrageous)

<comment><USER15> 1) Create page with title "<COUNTRY NAME> 2012 tsunami" for all countries in the world 2) ??? 3) Profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it ironic that a company that offers SEO services would send followed OB links to sites that they claim are harming the web.

</comment><comment><USER17> "query deserves freshness" is part of Google's algorithm so it knows to rank the newest articles at the top. It works great for news driven sites, works bad for e-commerce type sites that restock older items but they get outranked by a news site.

</comment><comment><USER18> It has been years since providing SEO services for a client meant 'make and market a website in the best way to accurately be indexed by search engines'.

Now it seems to mean 'make a website rank higher than it should in search engines'.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's important to find a reviewer you can trust in an area. I used to like Ben Kuchera's video game reviews at Ars Technica, Anandtech for hardware and Geek Brief (now Geek Beat) for random gadgets.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but those guys are losing the eyeballs of the masses with the borderline- fake SEO-oriented reviews. As the OP states, if the trend continues they will disappear.

<comment><USER21> It's not a terribly recent trend, though, and some sites are still flourishing, so it's not inevitable.

It's worth noting that Ben carved out his section of Ars Technica himself, basically proving the value of his paycheck by starting to write content and bringing in the readers. Prior to that, gaming coverage on Ars was extremely light to nonexistent. Now Kyle Orland is keeping up Ars's gaming coverage, and Ben has started another gaming coverage site at Penny Arcade.

Both are using an existing, relatively successful property to bootstrap, but that's fairly common in any business (the property may be called "your investors"), and coverage there and other places has arguably opened up a market for more independent game coverage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The web may need a social, distributed 'demerit' system which can punish subtle abuses faster than Google: a downvote button that works anywhere, and is somewhat gaming-resistant. (Even being just lightly more resistant than current keyword-squatting, click-baiting, link-whoring would be a marginal win.)

Zed Shaw's 'Utu'/<http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com> is one exploration of this concept.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's a big opportunity to solve this problem. I've always thought that a combination of expert reviews, combined with user reviews and those found on other reliable sources (Yelp, Amazon, etc) that were weighted via an algorithm could provide a more fair "review score" for products and services. Just like anything, the more data you get, the easier it is to provide a fair quantitative assessment.

</comment><comment><USER24> So, don't trust reviews from sources you don't know. That's where social networks can help.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Yes the official Nintendo magazine is impartial so this probably isn't a > deliberate strategy by the brand.

Impartial? Not unless things have changed a great deal from when I was reading _Nintendo Power_ in the early 2000s...

</comment><comment><USER26> I think gamification of SEO is killing all kinds of search, and this is part of why Google is investing in social search and G+.

Links are have more value when they're connected to a person's reputation.

</comment><comment><USER27> The only bad thing I can see is that the first-movers are stupid enough not to update the reviews when new version or whatever changes comes out.

</comment><comment><USER28> While there's certainly a lot of crap out there, the example used is weird. Yep, if you search for reviews for a product for which no credible reviews exist yet (due to it being unreleased), you're going to find garbage.

Search for reviews for a product which _actually exists_ , and you might get some better results. Drop the "U" from "Nintendo Wii Review" and you'll find reviews as sensible as you could hope for.

<comment><USER29> Try finding a review for any printer. or a car. or most cell phones. It's all link bait tar-pit SEO sites. This is what the article is talking about and he's absolutely right.

However, this does bring in an opportunity for someone to displace google. Not with better search but with better find-what-I'm-looking-for engines.

<comment><USER21> have you tried that? I don't know if it's changed recently or not, but I just tried some searches for reviews of a printer, a car, and a cellphone and got all seemingly reputable links on the first page.

<https://www.google.com/search?q=hp+officejet+pro+8600+review>

<https://www.google.com/search?q=2012+BMW+3+Series+reviews>

<https://www.google.com/search?q=lg+nitro+hd+review>

(these seemed like fairly typical products you might search for in these categories...I don't actually know any of them very well)

Now, that's not to say that cnet is the best place to get reviews, but it definitely isn't anywhere near as bad as the sites I seem to remember review queries formerly returning.

What we really need is a good way of searching for those really good review sites that people who know about them absolutely trust. I can't think of any way to structure a query that might get me from looking for a camera to danso's endorsement of DPReview above. Narrowing to forums might help get you there, but it would be nice to not have to open a bunch of discussion pages and scan for decent seeming sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> you might also find my earlier comment relevant - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972595>

I think that fake reviews (shilling) is a special class of problem. I don't believe it fits any of the normal categories of fraud (i.e. that's why I was happy it kind of was artificially added there) and yet I believe that what we lose by not regulating it is an important enough commons that it should be protected.

</comment><comment><USER31> Congrats on making it to the first page! :)</comment>


Listening, Growing and Adapting - <AUTHOR> https://veertu.com/usb-bridged-networking-support/ <comment><USER2> I didn't even know of this app until now. How does it compare to VirtualBox, VMware Fusion, or Parallels, for example?

<comment><USER3> Likewise. The announcement makes it sound like they tried to compete with free (VirtualBox) and couldn't.

<comment><USER4> It uses the native hypervisor in macOS, so it can be smaller than VirtualBox.

<comment><USER5> And since it uses Hypervisor.framework, it does not require any extra kexts and the App Store version was running in a sandbox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First time I've heard of this app -- how well does it run Windows?

<comment><USER7> I'm curious about that as well. I would love to get rid of Parallels (even despite my having recently upgraded to the Sierra-compatible version) because I find things to be too slow in general.

Any pointers/reviews/etc.?

<comment><USER8> There is a video on comparison which Parallel is the fastest, VMWare, Veertu and Virtualbox is the slowest.

Qemu/kvm might be the fastest and works but is a hassle to configure for my web development.

<comment><USER9> What video are you referring to? I'm just finding a boot speed video when googling and I'm not sure if that really qualifies as a proper measurement of "fastest" when comparing products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "We explored various methods to make these new features work with sandboxing restrictions of the App Store, but it seems that this is not possible."

I wonder if they tried using Docker's library/approach:

[https://github.com/docker/vpnkit](https://github.com/docker/vpnkit)

</comment><comment><USER11> It doesn't look like this open source version supports EFI boot, can it boot macos/osx? I know they have an internal version that does support EFI.

</comment><comment><USER12> For clarity, the way I read it the native version is leaving the App Store and closed source. The old non-native version is now open source.

<comment><USER13> What old non-native version? I think you've mis-read this.

They appear to be moving to an open-core model and expanding feature sets beyond what was allowed within the restrictions of Apple's App Store sandboxing, to better compete with VMware Fusion and Parallels for paid users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm confused, is there commercial version and what price? No "Buy" link is very confusing.

<comment><USER13> To support the transition for paid users, this is probably a free release as they work out payment methods, etc. They're moving to an open-core pricing model, which probably matches their previous strategy.

They've always been unclear when it comes to payment and features. Previous to this they had Business and Pro editions in the App Store and Pro was sold as an in-app purchase to a free version while Business was sold outright. Both cost the same and it was hard to compare the two...

If they want to sell the product later, you can bet they'll have clear Buy buttons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Have they fixed their problems with VPNs?

</comment><comment><USER16> It seemed silly this would have been compatible with the Mac OS sandbox in the first place

<comment><USER10> It uses hypervisor.framework [1] for building out virtual machines in userspace.

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor](https://developer.apple.com/reference/hypervisor)</comment></comment>


The Real-Life Plan to Drain the Mediterranean and Merge Africa and Europe - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-bonkers-reallife-plan-to-drain-the-mediterranean-and-merge-africa-and-europe <comment><USER2> In the Bay Area, we had the Reber Plan[1], to turn the bay into two fresh water lakes by building dams between Richmond-San Rafael, and Oakland-San Francisco.

Great photo of what it could have looked like[2].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan) [2] [https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b5/1a/d6/b51ad6d2a...](https://s-media-cache- ak0.pinimg.com/736x/b5/1a/d6/b51ad6d2a2b14f06013c00b65429add3.jpg)

<comment><USER3> There was also a plan in 1965 to fill part of the Bay by leveling San Bruno Mountain.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_Mountain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_Mountain)

<comment><USER4> Taking the move a mountain idiom a little too far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I think we should go the other way and build this thing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project)

I'd prefer the Nile variant, which would be hard to do for sure. But like the Salton Sea, flooding parts of the desert seems to have ecological benefits.

<comment><USER6> Did you read up on the Salton Sea? [1]

Ecological Benefits: "Once known as the "California Riviera", the Salton Sea is now called one of America's worst ecological disasters: a fetid, stagnant, salty lake, that coughs up dead fish and birds by the thousands in frequent die-offs that occur."

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_%26_Pleasures_on_the_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_%26_Pleasures_on_the_Salton_Sea)

<comment><USER5> Not sure how I'm supposed to read up with a movie... But yes I've driven by a few times and the smell was less than awesome.

But you're talking about the technical debt of the Salton project. It was pretty great at first and we were adding a new species every week. But eventually, support for the project was diverted and it dried up. Now the whole thing reeks of code smell and everybody knows we need to fix the thing -- but it's in a remote area so it's hard to convince management that the project is worth the resources to save.

<comment><USER6> Have you stopped to consider that this might be the natural outcome of such an endeavor?

Perhaps support was diverted simply because the benefits simply weren't going to outweigh the costs... ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the long term, maybe it's a fantastic idea. But in the short term, the economic damage of all those ports suddenly ceasing to be ports alone, to say nothing of all the other disruption, probably means the idea fundamentally has too high an activation energy to happen in any forseeable future.

(activation energy in chemistry: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation_energy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation_energy) )

But very interesting to think about.

Also XKCD did a comic series that probably technically constitutes the majority of XKCD's output by area which is worth looking at: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_\(xkcd\))

<comment> guard-of-terra Don't think it's a good idea at all. Waste precious coasts to get more more mundane heartland? Who ordered _that_? For nations that do not grow? In the world where agriculture is barely profitable?

Why would you need land, seriously, in 2016? Look at Hong Kong and Singapore, land is liability. Interesting how perspective changed in a hundred years.

<comment><USER8> But the archaeology would be _fantastic_.

<comment><USER9> We'd only have to drop the water level by 10/20 meters or so for the archaeology wouldn't we?

The black sea was only ~5000 years ago, now that would have some good archaeology.

<comment><USER8> There's a few thousand years of Mediterranean cargo and shipping distributed over the seabed.

And I'm sure Atlantis is down there somewhere...

<comment><USER4> A rather good point about the Mediterranean being used as a shipping channel! There would still need to be huge canals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As expected, this was not thought up by anyone who actually lived or grew up in a country along the coast of the Mediterranean.

The way the Aegean islands were supposed to be replaced by a plateau is particularly freaky, like hearing a plastic surgeon tell you they plan to replace your head with that of a donkey.

A truly callous, tone-deaf proposal, even given its historical context.

</comment><comment><USER11> What I don't understand is how Sörgel claimed that this plan would create more _farmland_. Wouldn't any land exposed by drops in sea level be irredeemably contaminated by salt, just like land being inundated by rising sea levels?

<comment><USER12> A fair bit of land in areas that was heavily glaciated was formerly below sea level and has been raised by post-glacial isostatic rebound - a lot of this is farmed so I don't think there is a fundamental problem.

<comment><USER13> I think the problem is getting enough rainfall to rinse salt from the topsoil.

I don't know how much is needed. Parts of Sweden were in the Baltic during Viking times but are now farmland, so perhaps no more than a few hundred years? Then again, there's more rain in those areas of northern America and Europe where the glaciers were than in the Mediterranean.

<comment><USER14> I think a very long time indeed. The classic way to render fields unfit for generations is to salt them.

<comment><USER13> I wondered how long it took for the fields of Carthage to be fertile again. If my supposition is correct, it should need only a few years for normal rain to carry it away, not generations.

I found [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salting_the_earth) which suggests that the salting was more symbolic, or a curse, and that "There is no evidence that sufficient amounts of salt were used to render large tracts of land unusable."

Given how expensive salt was, it seems like it would be horrendously expensive to do that in the classical era.

<comment><USER14> And yet the Central Valley of California has square miles of dead land, due to selenium salts(?) that build up. They don't go away. They creep to the surface and appear as a crusty deposit. Salt is weird, and irrigation water evaporates it doesn't 'wash away' anything.

<comment><USER13> Portions of the Central Valley do not flow to the sea. Salt stays in a basin. To note, we were discussing land which emerged from the sea due to post- glacial rebound, or where the sea was lowered through engineering effect, not basins. Nor is Carthage in a basin.

Agricultural water runoff is a thing. The water doesn't all evaporate. Quoting [http://www.watereducation.org/post/salinity-central- valley-c...](http://www.watereducation.org/post/salinity-central-valley- critical-problem) , "Every time a farmer irrigates a crop, salt ends up concentrating in the runoff and groundwater."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What's not even mentioned in the article is that this could protect the entire Mediterranean coast line against rising sea levels[1].

[1] [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11069-015-1821-8](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11069-015-1821-8)

<comment><USER16> If you pumped all of the Mediterranean into the rest of the world oceans, that would raise sea level about 7.4 meters. (The volume of the Mediterranean is about 3,750,000 km^3, the surface area of the rest of the world oceans is about 507,500,000 km^2.)

I think a few existing coastal cities might object...

<comment><USER17> Alternatively, you could pump the water to land for desalination and agriculture.

<comment><USER18> Where do you think the water goes after being consumed by humans or plants?

<comment><USER19> If we're talking about fantasy-scale ecological modifications, there's no reason to ever turn off the pumps, is there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Title is inaccurate. Atlantropa was never meant to "drain" the Mediterranean, just lower the water level by 200m--compare to the current 1500m average/5267m maximum. Most of the original water surface area would remain, as the diagram in the article shows. Still pretty impractical, of course.

</comment><comment><USER21> Dividing the new land would be crazy. Maybe even inner countries (Germany, ...) would want a piece.

And there is also this theory that the great Bible flood was the Mediterranean Sea spilling into the Black Sea. If the Gibraltar dam fails we would see the mother of all floods from the Atlantic rushing in.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis)

<comment><USER22> > inner countries (Germany, ...)

Inner country in what sense? Germany has two coasts. A claim would still be reasonable, as Mallorca is Germany's 17th state. An epic battle would arise early in the morning, as usual started by the Germans claiming the land by putting towels on it, but soon they would have to fight off Brits in their sunburned bright red warpaint.

<comment><USER9> > A claim would still be reasonable, as Mallorca is Germany's 17th state

For those wondering what the hell this is about, apparently it's a running joke about the number of German tourists there.

<comment><USER23> And not only tourists. There are so many Germans than in a town they elected a German major.

<comment><USER22> Economically Spain is benefiting in two ways from the freedom of movement of the EU: Old people from Germany moving to Spain, spending, young people from Spain moving to Germany, earning.

Socially this might not be desired and environmentally – at least on Mallorca – it is a disaster.

<comment><USER24> How is young people moving to Germany contributing to Spain?

Earning? They spend most of their money where they live.

In the past engineers used to create wealth in Spain, creating 30 to 40% of the Gross product in Industry in Spain. Now it is 10%.

I am engineer and I have a company in central Europe, I know.

Educated people moving to Germany to create wealth there is a disaster for Spain. You are payed in salary 10 because you contribute at least 20 or 30 to the country you work in.

Training an engineer cost Spain 40 to 50.000 euros in public education. Them moving to USA or Germany is an enormous transfer of wealth.

<comment> guard-of-terra I wonder why I don't know any IT consulting giants in Italy or Spain.

I mean, climate is awesome and prices are lower than in Switzerland or UK where many of those are located, and quality of life is much better than in Poland or Ukraine where more of them are located. Where's your IT consulting? Maybe you ought to remove a few roadblocks for them? I'll be the first one to move to Italy and pay taxes there if provided with workplace and visa.

<comment><USER22> You cannot compare Ukrainian prices to Italian. Italy's GDP per capita is almost 5 times the Ukrainian and the German is not even 1.5 times the Italian. Add in a language barrier and you have your answer.

Also northern Italy is where all the industry sits and its productivity is comparable to north-western Europe, the south is dragging Italy down.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

<comment> guard-of-terra There's no reason why the language barrier will be there in Italy but not in Ukraine. Will definitely not affect offshore devs coming on your turf (like with Poland, which imports a lot of Ukrainian and Russian IT workforce).

If London and Zurich can afford IT consultancies, why not Italy? 'cause I've not heard of those.

WRT "south dragging Italy down", I actually don't think this is true. I think it's more like an excuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Speaking of a drained Mediterranean, Harry Turtledove wrote a called Down in the Bottomlands, about a world where the Mediterranean did not refill after the Messinian Salinity Crisis. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_in_the_Bottomlands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_in_the_Bottomlands)

<comment><USER25> Turtledove was my favorite author for about 2 months until I was unable to tell any of his characters apart because he gave them all the same dry, ultra sarcastic humor and vulgar vocabulary. Still his ideas were very interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is a one-hour documentary about the Atlantropa project on Vimeo:

[https://vimeo.com/92381391](https://vimeo.com/92381391)

</comment><comment><USER4> Moving water really enhances places aesthetically.

I noticed that the disused Clyde docklands in Glasgow (UK), were being filled in a few years back. A missed opportunity for waterside property.

</comment><comment><USER27> The Mediterranean was also damned at Gibraltar in the Star Trek The Motion Picture novelization.

<comment><USER9> In TNG the built a whole new continent int the Indian ocean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Where would all that water go? Atmosphere? Isn't water vapor a greenhouse gas?

</comment><comment><USER29> Wonder how much this would have raised global sea levels.

</comment><comment><USER30> The Mediterranean Valley would have been hella deep.

<comment><USER28> 1500 m average

<comment><USER31> During the Messinian Salinity Crisis the deepest parts of the Mediterranean basin would have had summer time temperatures of up to 80 C.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So that's what they meant when they said they'll stop illegal migrants drowning, they'll drain the sea.</comment>


GitHub faces more resignations in light of ICE contract - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/13/github-faces-more-resignations-in-light-of-ice-contract/ <comment><USER2> That is how it works. If you have issues with your employers business decisions, then you are free to leave and move to an employer that you can agree with.</comment>